While I 100% agree with your overarching point, I think it's interesting that learning programming myself in the late 90s meant that I had far fewer resources. I got very very stuck, for sure, but it meant that I wasn't just copy-pasting solutions I didn't understand.

This was exacerbated by GML (the Game Maker Language) being the first real programming language I learned and used a lot. Idiosyncratic to say the least, but taught me "OOP" in terms of how scripts attach to objects to define behaviour. Fascinating stuff. Game Maker 4 is the reason I'm a programmer two decades on!